After the Wedding

Director Susanne Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, who collaborated on the superior Danish dramas Open Hearts (2002) and Brothers (2004), continue their winning streak with this 2006 feature, though the writerly quality of Jensen's work is more pronounced here. A committed counselor at a Bombay orphanage (Mads Mikkelsen of Casino Royale) is sent home to Denmark to schmooze some much-needed funding from a wealthy businessman (Rolf Lassgard) and discovers that his former lover (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is now the philanthropist's wife. As the premise might suggest, Jensen's dramatic structure is so visible this sometimes seems like a late Rod Serling teleplay, but Bier has proved highly adept at merging conventional drama with the immediacy of the Dogma 95 movement. In Danish with subtitles. R, 119 min.
ByJ.R. Jones